Leverage, or the use of debt to help finance an acquisition, is sometimes al
so called "gearing" and this is a very good way in which to think about it.
If an engineer adds an additional (smaller) gear wheel to an existing one, t
hen he knows that by so doing he is increasing the number of times the spind
le attached to the smaller wheel will rotate relative to the rotations of th
e larger one, thus increasing the speed of the whole mechanical process invo
lved. If a buyout professional goes in for financial engineering, this invol
ves, in its simplest form, adding debt into the financing mix to increase th
e impact of the underlying equity. So it is quite apt to think of debt as an
extra gear wheel, which does not affect the performance of the equity (just
as the smaller gear wheel does not affect the speed of the larger, original
gear wheel), but does greatly increase the impact which it is able to have
on the overall return of the transaction, just as the smaller gear wheel ena
bles the large one to have a much greater impact on the speed of the process
.

杠杆作用就是利用债务帮助融资被称为杠杆作用(Leverage)，有时候也被称为Gearing（
有机械传动，齿轮的意思），且后者是一种很好的理解方法。如果工程师把一个额外的
齿轮（小的）添加到已经在运转的齿轮上，那他知道这样做可以使连接在小齿轮上的转
轴和大齿轮上的转轴相互关联着旋转，并使得转动一圈的时间延长，这样整个机械设备
的运转速度就会加快。如果延伸到收购专家运作金融项目，就是说他以最简单的方式来
增加债务，使得潜在的资产净值增长。所以由于其不影响总体上的资产业绩表现（就像
较小的齿轮不影响原始的大齿轮的速度一样），我们倾向于把债务当做那个额外的小齿
轮一样来思考；但是这会极大地增加债务对整个交易回报的影响程度，就像较小的齿轮
式的大齿轮可以对整个机械的速度产生更大的影响一样。
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